Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (37 page)

Curiously, the Philae reconstruction, now almost completed, has never attracted the attention of the media, Gamal Wahbah tells me. He has seven papers in the works, shortly to be published in scholarly journals; but as far as he knows, there has been no mention of the project in the popular press: “Even when an official delegation from UNESCO arrived to inspect the work, the Egyptian papers gave it only a few lines.” Could Erich and I have chanced upon a journalistic scoop—a hard enough feat at the best of times and the more so when the makings of the scoop are already many centuries old—and all because Fattah was anxious to resume his friendship with a former colleague?

Returning to the Mut Precinct after several days’ absence, I find our diggers have made all sorts of progress: new bits of wall and entranceways have been uncovered, William Peck’s map showing these is coming along apace. “Look, we’ve completely cleared the forecourt, an architectural unit not known before—all previous maps ended at the pylon.” Richard’s mud-brick housing units are beginning to emerge as a coherent plan, now tentatively thought by the excavators to be remains of a Coptic settlement of the sixth century A.D. What’s more, he has found several interesting objects, including a hoard of coins and a pair of dice; first one die was found, a week later its mate. “Fun and games in ancient Egypt!” he exclaims. Best of all, Peck has just received proofs of his forthcoming book,
Drawings from Ancient Egypt
, which will be lavishly illustrated with photographs taken by his co-author, John G. Ross. Among the hitherto unpublished offerings are “erotica and scurrilities which do not form part of the repertoire of the monumental artists, and give a glimpse of another face of Egypt beneath the veil of Isis,” plus “many comic or satirical drawings—a topsy-turvy world in which cats serve mice, and the fox is the trusted guardian of the geese.” I can hardly wait for the finished book, which is scheduled for publication this autumn in England, Germany, France, and the United States.

TRIP NOTES

My last night in Egypt. I have said goodbye to those dear demented diggers and am packing up my own loot; best buys in the Luxor market are polished Egyptian cotton, priced after the requisite bargaining at about six Egyptian pounds per 6½-yard length; rings of debased but pretty silver set with semiprecious (or more likely semi-demi-precious) stones, said to be nineteenth century, one to two pounds; hand-strung Nubian beads, one pound a strand; saffron, at the astonishingly low price of less than one Egyptian pound per pound of weight, although it does seem to contain a certain amount of chicken feathers and other extraneous matter. Worst buys are the horrid little fake scarabs and statues pressed upon one by vendors everywhere. “But, Madame, it’s an antiquity!” said one. “Or it will be, if you keep it for a hundred years.”

I think back to my first conversation with James Manning. If it is sunrise for the science of Egyptology, he said, it may well be sunset for life in Luxor as experienced by travelers over the past century. The calashes, he fears, will soon be replaced by an efficient motor-bus system; already hideous concrete hotels are sprouting along the banks of the Nile. And shall we see, in place of the ancient mud-brick village that borders the Precinct of Mut, a spanking new Mut-el?

COMMENT

In the summer of 1977 I had a letter from the editor of
Geo
, a lavishly produced West German text-and-picture magazine, asking if I would do an article about San Francisco. Regretfully (for
Geo
pays top prices) I declined. I explained to the editor that, having lived in the San Francisco area for several decades, I did not think that I could produce an original and lively piece on the subject; he would do better to find a writer for whom California would be a totally new experience and who would see it all with a fresh eye.

By one of those coincidences that disturb the even flow of life, the day after I met James Manning there came another letter from the editor: Was there
anywhere
I would like to go for
Geo?
How about Egypt, I wrote (halfway hoping he would say that was too far afield). Done, he replied. Almost immediately I began to get cold feet—or, rather, to fear hot feet, having heard dread tales of the assaulting heat in those parts—but there had now been an Offer and an Acceptance, as the law of contracts has it, so I felt committed. Why hadn’t I plunged for San Francisco? Too late.

In taking on the Egyptian caper, I realized that I was violating two of my cardinal self-imposed rules about writing: never embark on a project unless you are deeply fascinated by it, and absorb all available information about your subject before approaching the target of the investigation. Obviously, since I knew nothing about Egypt I was not deeply fascinated; equally obviously, here was one case in which it would be folly to try to absorb even a fraction of the “available information.” Hence the elaborate disclaimer on pages 247–48, a useful trick of the trade by which one hopes to disarm the critical reader, although actually I boned up on Egypt a good deal more than I let on.

Despite misgivings, I was looking forward to this adventure. It would be, for me, a complete departure from the abrasive, contentious, dog-eat-dog world of courtrooms, business, and bureaucracy to which I had become accustomed in my capacity of muckraker. What could be more pleasantly relaxing than to explore the quiet realms of Pharaonic life in the company of dedicated, dispassionate scholars who are unharried by worldly preoccupations and immune to the crass self-interest that motivates the rest of us, their only desire in life to contribute in some modest way to the sum total of mankind’s knowledge of the Ancients?

Disillusionment was not long in coming. Muck in the archaeology world, I soon discovered, is knee-deep, there for the raking. Erich Lessing, a connoisseur of Egypt who had photographed in these same precincts twelve years earlier and had visited numerous excavation sites, clued me in: “Scratch the surface and you’ll find the crudest, most vicious jockeying for position amongst these distinguished academics....”

As days went on, I picked up all sorts of hints confirming Erich’s diagnosis of the real malady endemic to the Egyptologist, but this story could not be told then, because it was not what
Geo
wanted, and cannot be told now—it would involve, for me, revealing too many half-whispered confidences of people who in some ways resemble the inmates of a lunatic asylum. Like those inmates, they are full of real or imagined fears, beset by notions of betrayal and perfidy, consumed by irrational jealousies. Apparently it was ever thus: in
Tutankhamun: The Untold Story
, Thomas Hoving, former head of the Metropolitan Museum, gives a devastating picture of the political intrigue, backbiting, unremitting infighting that characterized the Tutankhamun expeditions— not a word of which is breathed by Howard Carter in his account of the discovery, in which all is high-minded devotion to the science of archaeology.

It is hard to conceive of what gives rise to these quirky characteristics; surely not a lust after material wealth, for the chosen life style of the Egyptologist is austere in the extreme. Desire for power? Perhaps, in the constricted sense of power in that field of endeavor. A place in history, or at least a footnote in some archaeological journal? Who knows. Perhaps some go-ahead psychiatric institute should establish a chair for the specific purpose of finding out what makes Egyptologists tick.

Fortunately Erich Lessing, who was commissioned by
Geo
to supply the photographs for my piece, proved to be a rock of sanity in this queer ambience, and in many ways a kindred soul. Like me, he was unenthralled by mounds of ancient rubble, by the omnipresent “storage areas” filled with fragments of stones and broken bits of statues so beloved by the Egyptomaniacs, by those highly prized shards whose careful cataloguing was a major preoccupation of the diggers. (In my piece for
Geo
, mindful of the probable desire of its Teutonic readers for solid and scholarly information, I put in many paragraphs about those dismal shards, their historic importance, new developments in coding and dating them, which out of consideration for the English and American reader I have cut from the version given here.)

“Oh dear, if I never see another shard in my life it won’t be too soon,” I sighed to Erich as we stumbled about yet another storage area. He muttered something in German that sounded like “shard.” What was that? I asked. “It’s a German word, ‘
Schadenfreude
,’ ” he said. “Roughly translated, it means ‘malicious joy in the misfortune of others.’ ” Which seemed to sum up the whole Egyptomaniacal experience.

The ending of this piece gave me trouble. Ambivalent as I was (and am) about the Egypt freaks, my original final paragraph ran as follows: “Listening to them tell of these developments, my unfortunate inborn propensity for skepticism and scoffing dissolves, and I feel most privileged to have met this attractive and dedicated group of people, to have had the rare opportunity of being in on the ground floor of some of their achievements.”

This ending was greeted with shrieks of derision by those to whom I sent a draft copy of the manuscript. My daughter: “That’s
really
phony, doesn’t sound like you at all.” Robert Gottlieb at Knopf: “What’s the matter? You’ve gone all soft and sugary.” Marge Frantz, valued helper and adviser: “Sounds like a cop-out, after all you told me about it.” Pulling myself together, I rewrote the ending as in the version given here.

However, as the reader may have divined, the final-final ending was not too satisfactory to me either, for it contains no hint of my real dilemma. Going to Egypt in search of a restful vacation from my métier, I found muck up to the armpits. Had my rake been out and at the ready, I could have piled the stuff up—but
where?
There was nowhere to unload it. Restraint may not be in my nature but in this case, being for hire to
Geo
, I reluctantly hung up the rake—and although the aroma of such alluring potential muck heaps as the Coca-Cola Connection set my nostrils aquiver, I resolutely turned my back and made not the slightest inquiry as to why Coca-Cola was suddenly courting an Egyptian goddess of many millennia ago. Could it have something to do with the Arab blacklist to which the purveyors of this revolting beverage had been consigned as traders with Israel? I shall never know. “Get thee behind me, Coca-Cola” was my slogan as I staggered around the Mut excavation site. So I include “Egyptomania” here with apologies, merely as an example of one that got away.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1957, 1958, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1971, 1974, 1977, 1978, 1979 by Jessica Mitford

Introduction copyright © 2010 by Jane Smiley

All rights reserved.

Grateful acknowledgment made to Chappell Music Co. for permission to reprint lines from “Sixteen Tons” by Merle Travis. Copyright © 1947 by American Music, Inc. Copyright renewed, all rights controlled by Unichappell Music, Inc. (Rightsong Music, publisher). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Cover image: Manuscript page of the introduction to Poison Penmanship; the Jessica Mitford Collection of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State University Libraries

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Mitford, Jessica, 1917–1996.

 Poison penmanship : the gentle art of muckraking / by Jessica Mitford;

preface by Jane Smiley.

   p. cm.

 ISBN 978-1-59017-355-8 (alk. paper)

1. Journalism. I. Title.

 PN4726.M55 2010

 070.92—dc22

2009050089

eISBN 978-1-59017-529-3
v1.0

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www.nyrb.com
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